Susarma Lear shouted “Look!” three times more—and I could hear the hope creeping back into her voice—while we covered another kilometre or so. We were moving more slowly now, no longer in a straight line, and I was getting very tired—but I knew that Myrlin had been going without sleep a lot longer than I had, and I could hardly blame the star-captain for conserving the hope that we might find him fast asleep on an islet at any moment.
Eventually, though, we came to a much greater expanse of open water, and the signs of Myrlin’s passage vanished entirely.
The wild goose had flown.
“We’d better rest a while,” the star-captain said. Her voice had the texture of ground glass, but she still wasn’t prepared to say out loud that she admitted defeat.
“If you were to report that you’d caught and killed him,” I pointed out, delicately, as we sprawled on the last of a chain of islets, looking out over the placid lake, “no one would ever know the difference.”
“That’s not the Star Force Way,” she said, severely.
“This isn’t Star Force territory,” I told her.
“The Star Force doesn’t have territory,” she informed me, frostily. “But wherever the Star Force goes, it does things the Star Force Way.”
“Sure,” I said. “If you don’t win the Star Force Way, you lose the Star Force Way. No ifs or buts, just—”
“I heard the joke the first time, Rousseau,” she said. “I don’t want to hear it again. Here’s the plan. We make our way back to the edge of the swamp as quickly as we can, and then we make our way around it. He’s got to come out somewhere. It’s just a matter of picking up his trail there.”
I suppressed a groan. I suspect that I wasn’t the only one. I began to shake my head instead, and then I stopped, because my eye had caught a movement in the dark surface of the lake. It was a ripple, rolling in towards the shore.
It was a very big ripple, and it wasn’t alone.
“Captain,” Serne whispered. He’d seen it too, and he was drawing his gun even as he spoke.
I didn’t reach for mine. They were only ripples, even if it did look as if whatever was causing them might be vast.
We all waited for something substantial to break the surface, but it seemed just as vitreous as ever, even though it had a curiously marbled effect, and no longer seemed quite as flat as it had been.
Whatever was there had to be moving under its own power, because there was no current for it to drift on, but it was hard to figure out exactly where it might be or exactly how fast it might be moving.
Khalekhan had drawn and raised his gun, but he lowered it again. “There’s nothing—” he began—but Serne had leveled his own weapon; he was taking aim.
All I could see was murky water. Nasty water, but only water—except that it wasn’t.
It was obvious now that the surface was no longer flat, but it really did seem as if the lake itself had come to life, and that it was the water itself that was flowing towards us. It wasn’t the water, although it was just as transparent, and seemingly just as fluid. It was something very big and very strange, oozing along the bottom of the lake, but now that it was close it was rearing up like some kind of giant domelike wave.
There were thin pinpricks of light inside it.
It was a gargantuan blob of protoplasm: an amoeboid leviathan. It must have been more than sixty metres across, although it probably wasn’t round; it probably wasn’t any easily definable shape.
The pseudopods were already out of the water, flowing at us like giant hands with too many fingers. “Flowing at us” doesn’t sound all that threatening, but I felt well and truly threatened.
So did Serne. He had already opened fire, and he had altered the setting of his flame-pistol, so that it was letting out great gouts, like the gun in Myrlin’s trap, rather than the delicate beam he’d used to kill the spiky predator.
Khalekhan raised his gun again. So did Susarma Lear.
My own instinct was to flee. I danced backwards, away from the groping jelly. It was like trying to jump out of a stream of treacle, but I managed to haul myself away, and once I was free I could move faster than the protoplasm could flow, at least while I was still on the islet.
I’d like to be able to say that I knew that my moment had finally arrived, and that I was boldly and gladly seizing my opportunity, but it wouldn’t be true. The Star Force code compels me to admit that I simply panicked. While three tongues of lethal fire turned substantial—but relatively tiny—parts of the amazing creature to murky steam, I ran like hell.
If the creature had had a brain, Serne would doubtless have picked it out and made his fire-power tell—but it didn’t. It kept on flowing, the coenocytic mass splitting here, there and anywhere in response to the flame-flood, but not dying. The creature didn’t mind being boiled and sliced, and it was very, very big indeed.
I only glanced back the once, to see the glutinous grey gel flowing up and up and up the legs and torsos of the intrepid soldiers of Old Earth; then I concentrated on making my own escape. I plunged into the water on the far side of the islet and kept on going, heading for the next in the chain. I crossed that one, and the next, and the next.
A scream was ringing in my ears. There were probably three voices, but there was only one interminable scream. It wasn’t a scream of agony or anguish, but of pure unadulterated horror. I tolerated it for what seemed like twenty or thirty seconds, and then I switched off the radio. It was easier, then, to keep on going. I was safe, but I kept going anyway. I was alone, and I was free. Their game was over, and the only one left to play was my own.
27
In the urgency of my flight from the lake monster I had come well away from the trail the four of us had blazed as we followed the fugitive indications of Myrlin’s passage. I wasn’t even sure of the direction I had taken, or which direction we had been facing after all our zigs and zags in the swamp.
I was lost—but after cursing myself briefly, I calmed down. I figured that I had to be heading back in the direction of the edge of the swamp, and that wherever I came out, I’d be able to follow the star-captain’s last plan and make my way around it—partially, at least—before retracing my steps and trying the other direction, until I found the place where we’d gone in. I had plenty of time; there was no problem, provided that I didn’t encounter any more nasty denizens of the swamp.
To keep myself company I tongued in the music tape that I always had set up in my helmet. It helped to steady me, because it restored the familiarity of the situation, to the extent that it could be restored. I was alone, in semi-darkness, beneath the surface of Asgard—and that had become, in the course of the years, the existential situation of the real me.
I began to feel confident, and even slightly cheerful. I had made the great discovery at last. I had found the way to Asgard’s heart.
I put the star-captain and her troopers out of my mind. I blotted them out of my consciousness and memory. They had interrupted the course of my destiny, and now they were gone. I was back on track. I couldn’t afford to dwell on the tragedy that had overtaken them; I had other things to think about, and new plans to make.
Eventually, plan one paid its first dividend. I reached the edge of the swamp. It was only then that I realised how utterly exhausted I was. I put a good ten metres between myself and the water’s edge, and I sank down on to the ground, lying there quite still, listening to the music.